A mainland police chief has boasted of recruiting one in every 33 local residents as an informant, official media reported yesterday.
The director of an Inner Mongolian public security bureau said officers had recruited 12,093 of his county’s 400,000 inhabitants to provide intelligence, with the admission offering an unusual glimpse into the state’s surveillance network.
Liu Xingchen told Xinhua the priorities were to collect information about conflicts that might lead to complaints to authorities and to discover “non-harmonious elements”.
While the mainland’s surveillance network is known to be extensive, it is not clear how active the informants in Kailu county are, or how typical the figures are of wider practices.
Liu said all officers had to recruit 20 informants, with those in criminal investigation units finding extra “eyes and ears”.
The bureau had sought to “dig deep for intelligence information on many fronts, proactively discover non-harmonious elements that affect stability ... [and try to] evolve from being passive to being active, to go from punishing after the fact to resolving the problem before the fact”.
Liu cited officers who found out that villagers planned to protest to higher authorities and “dissuaded” them from doing so.
Although petitioning is a legal and longstanding practice, officials are under pressure to keep down the number of complainants from their areas and often resort to methods such as harassment or detention.
Nicholas Bequelin, an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said police could easily force people to inform, without adding them to the payroll, through measures including threatening their careers.
“Although China’s surveillance system is particularly thorough, these [kinds of claims about numbers] seem to be always written from the point of view of security institutions that want to show how professional they are and what incredible resources they have,” he added.
Joshua Rosenzweig, of Dui Hua, a group seeking better treatment of detainees in China, said: “I certainly don’t expect they are all regularly producing valuable information.”
Information sought was likely to range from details of “unreliable elements” - such as people seeking to organise politically - to warnings of potential conflicts such as land seizures.
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Police chief boasts of 12,000 informants
The Guardian in Beijing
12 February 2010
A mainland police chief has boasted of recruiting one in every 33 local residents as an informant, official media reported yesterday.
The director of an Inner Mongolian public security bureau said officers had recruited 12,093 of his county’s 400,000 inhabitants to provide intelligence, with the admission offering an unusual glimpse into the state’s surveillance network.
Liu Xingchen told Xinhua the priorities were to collect information about conflicts that might lead to complaints to authorities and to discover “non-harmonious elements”.
While the mainland’s surveillance network is known to be extensive, it is not clear how active the informants in Kailu county are, or how typical the figures are of wider practices.
Liu said all officers had to recruit 20 informants, with those in criminal investigation units finding extra “eyes and ears”.
The bureau had sought to “dig deep for intelligence information on many fronts, proactively discover non-harmonious elements that affect stability ... [and try to] evolve from being passive to being active, to go from punishing after the fact to resolving the problem before the fact”.
Liu cited officers who found out that villagers planned to protest to higher authorities and “dissuaded” them from doing so.
Although petitioning is a legal and longstanding practice, officials are under pressure to keep down the number of complainants from their areas and often resort to methods such as harassment or detention.
Nicholas Bequelin, an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said police could easily force people to inform, without adding them to the payroll, through measures including threatening their careers.
“Although China’s surveillance system is particularly thorough, these [kinds of claims about numbers] seem to be always written from the point of view of security institutions that want to show how professional they are and what incredible resources they have,” he added.
Joshua Rosenzweig, of Dui Hua, a group seeking better treatment of detainees in China, said: “I certainly don’t expect they are all regularly producing valuable information.”
Information sought was likely to range from details of “unreliable elements” - such as people seeking to organise politically - to warnings of potential conflicts such as land seizures.
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